02 Chapter 02 — The Long Tenure / Annual Customer Briefing 2025
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Why enterprises stay for thirty years

Four commitments that have not moved since 1977 — and the receipts that prove it.

01

Compatibility we promise in writing

Every release ships with binary compatibility back to the last long-term version — your stored procedures run untouched after upgrade.

14 major releases · 0 breaking changes to SQL surface

02

Support that outlives the contract

Long-term support windows run a minimum of ten years per release, with extended security patches available for an additional five.

10-year baseline · 15-year extended

03

Performance measured against itself

Each generation must clear the prior generation on the same hardware before it ships — no benchmark cherry-picking, no regression headroom.

2.4× faster OLTP vs the prior release

04

Operations built for the night shift

Rolling upgrades, online schema changes, and zero-downtime failover are not premium add-ons — they are the default deployment topology.

99.995% measured fleet availability